Ex-NFL player rips New York Giants owner John Mara

New York Giants co-owner John Mara took quite a bit of heat this week after announcing that he was retaining both general manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll after a second consecutive miserable season.

Since finishing the 2022 season at 9-7-1 with a playoff berth, the Giants have fallen on hard times, compiling a 9-25 record. Mara is clearly not pleased but decided to stay the course one more year with the duo he felt would change the fortunes of his franchise just three short years ago.

That aside, the leash is much shorter now and optimism is, well, sketchy. Asked how long it would take to “improve the product,” Mara was curt.

“It better not take too long because I’ve just about run out of patience,” he told reporters on Monday.

Mara speaks as if he’s on the outside looking in; an injured party in all of this. The reality is that he just might be the driving force behind the Giants’ decade-long devolvement down into the NFL’s Skid Row.

His out-of-body reaction to the team’s disintegration is odd to anyone who’s ever been around the NFL. Owners are supposed to take charge, not shift blame. This “recommitment” to Schoen and Daboll seems more like a move made by a defeated man who is hoping the world will come back around to him instead of making the proper changes to succeed.

Former NFL player Domonique Foxworth, speaking on ESPN’s Get Up, doesn’t like the message Mara is sending out regarding the status of Schoen and Daboll.

“By saying this, what you’re essentially doing is undercutting them and putting them in a position next year that every single week, they’re going be like, ‘Hey, is the patience up or not?’ The players are at home thinking, ‘Oh, our coach and our general manager are on thin ice,’” Foxworth said.

The retired seven-year NFL veteran cornerback then outlined what Mara should have said on Monday to ensure the team and the rest of the organization that he still has confidence in the vision.

“You have to say, ‘Look, I know when I made this decision these are the right guys for the job. We haven’t gone on the right path, but we had a conversation yesterday’ — whether you did or you didn’t — ‘and they presented to me a plan that I sincerely believe in and you guys will see. I don’t know about a timeline, I don’t care how long it takes, I know they’re the right guys.’

“And then you can go home and tell your wife, ‘Man, I don’t know about these idiots,’ but when you are on camera, this is called leadership. This is what you do.”

Leadership is something the Giants have lacked ever since Tom Coughlin exited the building after the 2015 season. If you recall, he brushed by Mara on his way out, a move that spoke volumes about how he felt the organization was being run.

In the nine years since that day, the Giants have had just two winning seasons sprinkled in among seven seasons where they lost 10 or more games.